A viral nine-month world cruise saw plenty of drama, but not the kind you'd expect

Rachel Treisman

September 19, 2024 / 4:03 am

caption: TikToks by passengers on the Ultimate World Cruise — screenshot by NPR — capture the highs and lows of the nine-month journey, which ended last week.

When Royal Caribbean’s “Ultimate World Cruise” sailed out of Miami and into social media virality in December, it promised an unforgettable nine months:

For passengers, a once-in-a-lifetime journey to all seven continents.

And for viewers, a 360-degree stream of on-board drama, as told from the perspective of a rotating cast of characters (since people could join at any point for one or more segments of the trip).

Many of the roughly 650 full-timers on board started posting videos to TikTok and Instagram, filming their routines at sea and explorations on shore. And a handful of existing content creators — firmly rooted on land, from New York to California — studied and synthesized those videos to report on the cruise in real time.

They recapped the week’s events, introduced new characters, chased down rumors using their onboard contacts and speculated about what kinds of spectacles lay ahead. One even made a bingo card, with squares ranging from an early departure to a pirate takeover.

The potential for drama was so high, and the content so ubiquitous, that fans began referring to the cruise as a “TikTok reality show,” even as some worried that online hype would warp or otherwise worsen passengers’ real lives.

Last week — after 274 nights, more than 60 countries and many millions of social media views — the cruise came to an end. Which means it’s finally time to ask: How did it live up to the hype?

“This absolutely should have been a reality TV show. It would have won so many awards,” said Kara Harms, who runs a travel and lifestyle brand and covered the cruise on social media — she created two bingo cards, the first of which took only a couple of weeks to get to bingo.

NPR caught up with several people who were either on board the ship or following it closely on social media.

They all spoke of forming lifelong friendships, marveling at world wonders (either firsthand or vicariously) and generally expanding their cultural horizons. They also confirmed that the experience wasn’t without drama.

“I mean, you cannot stick that many people together in a small space and not have there be drama,” said passenger and TikTokker Jenny Hunnicutt.

But it wasn’t necessarily the kind that people had expected, like romance rumors or interpersonal beefs. The bigger scandals came from much heavier external factors — like politics, war and literal forces of nature — that passengers had to weather during their time together.

The ship rerouted a leg of its trip to avoid the ongoing conflict in the Red Sea, got delayed by climate protesters in Amsterdam and narrowly missed a massive earthquake in Taiwan. Passengers had to be evacuated from Iceland’s Blue Lagoon because of volcanic activity. And on board, many followed — and increasingly fought over — the many twists and turns of the fast-approaching U.S. presidential election.

“I think they definitely started with the more light, fun things like running out of wine or the boat’s flooding from a storm or stuff like that,” Harms explained. “And then they really launched into the realities of what happens when you sail a ship around the world for nine months: You're gonna encounter a lot of real things that happen.”

The real lives behind TikTok’s reality show

When NPR first spoke to content creators in January, just weeks into the cruise, the anticipation — and some anxiety — was apparent.

While passengers were excited about embarking on an adventure, some were apprehensive about their overnight internet fame and how it would affect the dynamics on board.

Many embraced it, said Hunnicutt, who notes that some content creators on board started going viral before they’d even met each other. That buzz brought them together in those early days and set in motion some lasting friendships.

“With the reality show comparison, we definitely leaned into that online in the beginning,” she said. “But this wasn't a reality show that we had signed up for and signed a contract, right? These were real life. So there was always that … you have to be very mindful of others.”

Videos from and about the cruise captivated social media for the first several months of the cruise, which creators say is an impressive amount of time for a trend to hold viewers’ attention.

As interest in the cruise spread across social media, two influencers who had been watching from land got sponsorship deals to come on board for brief stints — and promised to take their many followers behind the scenes with them. By the time both had come and gone, audience interest began to dip (one passenger points out this was around the time the ship arrived in China, where the international version of TikTok is unavailable).

Harms cut back on her cruise content but still kept tabs on what was happening on board.

“By this point, I have spent a lot of time forming these parasocial relationships with all these people on the cruise, but also some actual relationships, like DM’ing some people on there and forming semi-close friendships,” she explains.

As time passed, and the passengers and creators on land grew closer, the cruise coverage took on less of a gossip-rag feel.

Multiple people told NPR that once the initial frenzy calmed down, TikTokkers realized how the social media speculation could impact passengers’ real lives, for better or worse. The handful of land-based creators ended up working together to decide whether to amplify certain stories or link back to certain videos.

“You just really want to make sure that people trapped on the boat with a bunch of strangers are having the best time possible, because at the end of the day, they paid money to be here, and it's an experience and it's a vacation for them,” Harms added.

Beth Anne Fletcher, a photographer who gained a sizable following covering the cruise from her home in Derbyshire, England (“as far away from an ocean as you can possibly get” in the UK), estimates she’s made some 300 videos about it this year.

Of those, videos about people and the “so-called drama” tended to perform the best. But after hearing from viewers who wanted to follow along with the actual travel, she started making location-focused recaps too.

“For me, it was never about, I want to continually go viral,” Fletcher said. “It was more about, well, these people are living their best lives, and for a lot of us who might never have the opportunity to travel like this, it's a way for us to see the world through all of these different eyes ... And there’s only so much drama that can happen in nine months, surely.”

Fletcher got to board the cruise for a day during its sole stop in England in July and meet the passengers she’d spent so many months getting to know virtually.

She was shocked by how big the ship felt in real life. The 13-deck Serenade of the Seas is 965 feet long and 106 feet wide, according to Royal Caribbean.

“I was like, ‘OK, so this ship is actually big enough that if you don’t like people, you could easily not see them,’” she adds.

Passengers agreed it was fairly easy to steer clear of the more gossip-minded travelers.

Several content creators on board said the highlight of the trip was meeting people and making friends — and while social media played a role in that, it ultimately didn’t make or break their experience.

Take passenger Amike Oosthuizen, who had done some influencing before the cruise and, at the beginning of the year, spoke of pursuing it as a career afterward.

But last week, from her hotel room in Miami, she recounted how her TikTok account had been blocked just weeks before the end of the cruise: Someone reported it for selling counterfeit Chanel goods, which she said she was “obviously not doing.”

It was devastating, she said, especially because she lost a lot of videos — and memories — that she hadn’t saved off the app. She doesn’t regret all the filming, editing and posting she did, which she says taught her practical skills. But in hindsight, she wondered if some of that time would have been better spent living in the moment.

“It just showed me actually how volatile social media is,” Oosthuizen said. “I really do like doing social media, but I don't know if it is always like a thing I would want to do permanently.”

Now, about that drama

The world cruise wasn’t an isolated bubble. Some world events hit passengers especially hard.

“The big one that comes to mind that involved all of us was the big itinerary change and how the ship became a democracy,” Hunnicutt said. “We had to vote on which route we were going to choose when we were unable to sail through the Middle East.”

The ship was originally supposed to sail through the Suez Canal in May, but the cruise line announced earlier this year that it would be rerouted due to disruptions in the Red Sea, where Iranian-backed Houthis have been attacking ships since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.

Royal Caribbean gave passengers two options: “Immersive Africa,” a more scenic route that would stop at multiple ports along the continent, or “Africa & Greece,” which would aim to get the ship around Africa and to Eastern Europe as quickly as possible but involved many more days at sea.

“People were campaigning, people were sharing their opinions,” Hunnicutt recalled. “It was quite dramatic.”

Some of the people opposed to stopping in Africa made generalizations and arguments that their fellow travelers perceived as racist — like classifying the whole continent as a whole and saying there was “nothing to do there.”

The passengers voted overwhelmingly for the first option, to see more of Africa. But Hunnicutt says a fair number of people got off the ship for that portion — some rejoined in Italy, others did not.

“When you travel for nine months, things are going to change, like the state of the world is going to change,” Fletcher said. “So, many people were, ‘Let’s go with the flow,’ but others weren't. And I guess, again, that’s just representative of real life.”

Another area of growing tension was U.S. politics.

Fletcher said some people had been wearing MAGA hats and shirts on board all along. But the existing political divide on the ship became more apparent in the spring when former President Donald Trump was convicted on felony charges.

Things escalated over the summer after a passenger wore a “Let’s Go Brandon” hat. The rhetoric on display made some passengers uncomfortable, sparking a conversation about free speech and whether Royal Caribbean should draw a line.

Fletcher said lots of passengers started responding by wearing shirts and hats in support of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Harris wasn’t even in the running when they first got on the ship, a sign of just how much things changed during the journey. (A passenger picked up the merch in bulk while on shore in the final weeks.)

“Luckily, I guess there wasn't that long left of the cruise, otherwise perhaps it might have become more of an issue,” Fletcher says.